Cameroon collected 222.2 billion FCFA in transit rights on the Chad-Cameroon pipeline between 2020 and 2025, roughly 37 billion a year, with a further 15.1 billion booked by the end of May. Les Dépêches de Brazzaville published the figures as evidence of a cooperation model Central Africa could exploit further.
Read at the fixed euro peg, the six-year total is about 339 million euros, or roughly 56 million a year. That is what a state earns for carrying its neighbour’s entire oil export industry across 903 kilometres of its own territory. The number is worth sitting with before any West African government prices a corridor of its own.
What the state’s claim actually is
The pipeline entered service in 2003 and runs more than 1,000 kilometres from landlocked Chad to the Atlantic at Kribi, as Al Jazeera set out when the ownership dispute broke.
Two companies hold it, one per jurisdiction. TOTCO owns the Chadian section. COTCO owns the 903-kilometre Cameroonian section and the Komé Kribi 1 floating storage and offloading unit and, in the operator’s own words, transports and stores oil for customers who are charged a transportation tariff.
That defines the economics. Cameroon does not sell oil. It hosts a company that bills shippers, and it collects from that company. Its receipts are a function of throughput and tariff. They are indexed to neither the oil price nor the value of the cargo crossing the country.
Why the number is small
Three reasons, and none of them is negotiating failure.
The tariff base is a modest oil province. Al Jazeera recorded Doba, the anchor field complex, as seven producing fields with combined output of 28,000 barrels a day. A transit fee on a small volume is a small fee, regardless of how the convention is drafted.
The state carries the physical and social liabilities of the route without a share in the upside. COTCO’s exposure on the Cameroonian side included a mediated settlement with eleven Kribi fishing villages over environmental and economic losses to their activity, closing complaints filed against the project. Those costs are borne locally and permanently. The tariff is not adjusted for them.
And a transit entitlement is deliberately insulated from price. That insulation cuts both ways. Cameroon did not lose receipts when crude fell. It did not gain when crude rose either.
The offsetting virtue: it does not break
Here is the part that justifies the arrangement, and it is not visible in the headline figure.
Those payments continued through a comprehensive destruction of the pipeline’s ownership.
ExxonMobil sold its Chad and Cameroon operations to London-listed Savannah Energy for $407 million in December 2022, giving Savannah an effective 41.06% indirect interest in COTCO. Chad contested the terms. In March 2023 it nationalised all assets and rights of the ExxonMobil subsidiary, including its pipeline interest. Two months later Petronas sold its 29.77% of COTCO to Chad’s national oil company, a transaction CEMAC approved in Malabo on 15 May 2023 subject to conditions, including dilution of Chad’s holding in favour of Cameroon’s SNH and a cap on Chadian board seats. COTCO then told shareholders it had no notification of how those conditions would be met and postponed its shareholder meetings.
The question was closed by other means. Energy Voice reported that a 4 July 2023 COTCO meeting installed a Cameroonian managing director, a Chadian deputy and Chad’s hydrocarbons minister as chairman, a step Chad’s president called the final stage of nationalising the Exxon assets. Chad had already written to banks asserting that it and its national oil company held 53.77% of COTCO.
Savannah’s claims are unresolved. Its seven-month update, reported at the end of August, confirms arbitral proceedings begun in 2023 over the TOTCO nationalisation and further proceedings over its COTCO rights, with conclusion expected in the second half of 2026.
Equity was seized, reallocated and litigated. The transit receipts were not interrupted. Cameroon’s claim sat on a transport company operating under a convention, not on a shareholding exposed to the outcome in Paris.
The trade, stated plainly
A transit entitlement is reliable and small. An equity position is larger and contestable. Cameroon holds the first. Savannah thought it held the second and is three years into arbitration.
That is the choice a host state makes when it structures a corridor, and it is usually made once, at the convention stage, by people negotiating construction rather than the next twenty years of receipts.
What this means for West Africa
The Niger-Benin pipeline made transit a political question in 2024, when terminal access became an instrument rather than a contract. The Chad-Cameroon record shows how unusual that was. Kribi kept operating through worse ownership disorder than anything Niamey and Cotonou were disputing, because the arrangement did not depend on the shareholders agreeing.
Guinea’s case is structurally similar and legally different. Simandou moves ore across Guinean territory to a Guinean port through transport infrastructure that bills its users, with state participation and a transfer regime. Guinea is the origin as well as the host, so it holds both a resource claim and an infrastructure claim. But the infrastructure claim behaves like Cameroon’s: it is a charge on throughput. The tariff terms, third-party access rules and the state’s revenue basis are not public, so the useful question is not what the corridor will earn but what the earning is a claim on, and how it survives a change of shareholders. Shareholders in West African mining infrastructure change often.
What to watch
The ICC outcome on Savannah’s TOTCO and COTCO claims this half. It will put a number on what expropriating a midstream shareholder costs, which is the figure host states and infrastructure investors across the region will read.
Whether Chad and Cameroon formalise the shareholding split floated in 2023, and whether the CEMAC conditions set in Malabo were satisfied or simply overtaken.
Whether Cameroon’s receipts hold as Doba’s mature fields decline. A tariff is only as durable as the throughput beneath it.